Cinema and Moving Image Research Assembly

Tag Archives: German Pavilion

CAMIRA member Andrea Franco proposed a small program for the Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa (1- 4 October 2015) which was screening in loop at the festival’s mezzanine, at one of the videostations installed at Cinema Alvalade.

The program represents redfundamentos, a platform gathering projects of architecture and urbanism within a big network of schools and universities in Iberoamerica. The site redfundamentos.com runs the journal rita_ (Revista Indexada de Textos de Arquitectura); a blog with classic and new architectural works; a database for educational resources; and the audiovisual platform ‘canalfundamentos’, coordinated by Andrea Franco, from where they stream shorts, feature films and videoart. Following the festival’s theme, “Welcome to the Future”, the selection was named Liquid Times, Fluid Architecture:

“Architecture trembles. Structures run off the ground. Modern life is an earthquake defying stability. Living happens fast, we move, we transit, we belong to nowhere and all places; times are liquid, so is architecture. The past and the references are constantly threatened. The following filmmakers fix on celluloid, in a shaking manner, a series of constructions that will surely someday disappear from our landscape.

Paul Clipson’s Corridors (2006) is a cosmic fluxus made out of water, sunrays and city lights that eventually explode into architecture. The urban scenario comes after a Big Bang. Sparkling images evolve into shimmering constructions. The city appears like a prison; it is a fleeting New York Portrait where grilles and fences describe an oppressive habitat. Vision is only possible through railings. Zooms and reflections suggest permanent movement while the buildings dissolve within the vertigo of light and music from outer space.

Albert Alcoz’s Prelude (2011) presents a blurred image of Mies Van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, in Barcelona. Playing with the speed and the diaphragm of the camera, this icon of Modern Architecture fades into a watery landscape, shuddering the principles of a glorious avant-garde.

By the same author, A Punt de Fuga (2014) produces an elusive architecture that challenges the laws of perspective by alternating their vanishing points.

For La Grande Dame (2011) – as the business people of Montreal called this new skyscraper erected in the city in the early 60’s – Alexandre Larose shot with a long lens and edited in-camera in order to dislocate both scale and distance, thus we fall from the heights through a nightmarish architecture of never-ending façades and windows in a row. A split-screen makes a two lane road where a fast race is taking place between the different stories of the building.

These four pieces show vertiginous and uncertain architectures expressing our liquid times. These are the times when building seems futile because everything vanishes into velocity and condemned to being ephemeral. Values can no longer hold or last. Cities are just the material signs of the process, but never the most real or truthful.”